Saturday, 28 February 2009

Jon Favreau’s phone number can be clearly made out in a picture the Post chose for their Op-Ed page on Friday, which depicts President Obama making his remarks to Congress on Tuesday. Taken by a Reuters photographer from above, you see Obama reading from the first page of the address — and clearly printed is: "Draft 2/24/09 12pm…Favreau/Rhodes….6-1334 | 312-805-xxxx." (Number redacted.)

Months later, summer of ’75, a freelance photographer uses a high-powered telephoto lens in Helsinki, Finland, to snap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reading documents. Enlargements show the docs to be a top-secret memo from President Ford outlining U.S. negotiating strategy for SALT talks with the Soviets.

The photographer sells his prints and negatives to the [National] Enquirer for big bucks.

Gene travels by train from Florida to Washington, D.C., and personally hands the photographs to CIA director William Colby.

Friday, 27 February 2009

Obambi is always quick to say that he respects the contributions of our armed forces. There is a difference between respect and lip service. Today he announced his plan for Iraq and could not bring himself to use the word "victory." Of course, "victory" would vindicate the war itself and Obambi is too petty to do that. Instead he took another path:

And for you and for your families, the war does not end when you come home. It lives on in memories of your fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who gave their lives. It endures in the wound that is slow to heal, the disability that isn’t going away, the dream that wakes you at night, or the stiffening in your spine when a car backfires down the street.

This is a very subtle form of the soldier-as-victim trope that is fast becoming an Iraq legacy. For soldiers throughout history--those who have endured physical and emotional sufferings of an essential similar quality, if less clinically expressed--the trials of war were at least partially ameliorated by the salve of personal honor and, if the battle went well, the celebration of a victory. The troops who have served and serve still in Iraq should be singled out not just for the burdens of the fight but because they emerge from it, as Bing West’s book puts it, as the "strongest tribe."

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words- Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester- Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Imagine what Harry could have done with "quality child-care" and "job-training for spouses." (Via NRO Corner.)

George Will reports on scientists trapped between data and political correctness:

As for the anonymous scientists’ unspecified claims about the column’s supposedly myriad inaccuracies: The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.

Citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September "the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began." According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were "near or slightly lower than" those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.

So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying "we do not know where George Will is getting his information." The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center’s Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.

Obama made clear Tuesday night that he intends to be equally transformative. His three goals: universal health care, universal education, and a new green energy economy highly funded and regulated by government.

[...]

These revolutions in health care, education and energy are not just abstract hopes. They have already taken life in Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, a huge expansion of social spending constituting a down payment on Obama’s plan for remaking the American social contract.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt’s transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy.

In the European Union, government spending has declined slightly, from 48 percent to 47 percent of GDP during the past 10 years. In the United States, it has shot up from 34 percent to 40 percent. Part of this explosive growth in U.S. government spending reflects the emergency private-sector interventions of a Republican administration. But the clear intent was to make the massive intrusion into the private sector temporary and to retreat as quickly as possible. Obama has radically different ambitions.

The spread between Europe and America in government-controlled GDP has already shrunk from 14 percent to 7 percent. Two terms of Obamaism and the difference will be zero.

Conservatives take a dim view of the regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant, nanny state that is the European Union. Nonetheless, Obama is ascendant and has the personal mandate to take the country where he wishes. He has laid out boldly the Brussels-bound path he wants to take.

Thursday, 26 February 2009

At the Gannett newspaper chain, which publishes USA Today as well as dozens of other dailies across the country, journalists are also ambivalent about news they all have to take a week off--unpaid--before the end of March.

"People are looking at this as: ‘If I can try to save my job and the other jobs around me, I’m willing to do it.’ I haven’t heard any grumbling about it," said one Gannett journalist who declined to be identified because she feared she could lose her job.

"I’ve gone through several rounds of layoffs, and those were much worse," said the 20-year veteran writer. "Once you’ve seen your friend laid off, you’d much rather do the furlough."

Taranto has his usual fun with the unattributed source:

She’s afraid to lose her job even though she’s not revealing any internal information and she is praising her employer’s actions? You would think that a member of the press wouldn’t live in such fear of talking to the press.

Taranto misses the bigger picture. The "take a week off" program isn’t just about saving 8 percent of salary costs this quarter, it’s a test to see who is—and more importantly who is not—missed when he takes his week of forced leave.

Which brings us to Ms. "Save my job and the other jobs around me." I mean, come on. If she wants to save her job, she’ll go out of her way to pick up the slack for missing coworkers, and let the boss know. "Gosh, it was no problem for me to do Bob’s work while he was out."

The President also employs budget trickery on spending. He first assumes that Iraq spending will continue indefinitely at 2008 levels (which was never going to happen, according to the military’s own Joint Campaign Plan), and then calculates $1.5 trillion in savings against that baseline. If you eliminate that gimmick, President Obama increases spending by nearly $500 billion over ten years – not even counting the $634 billion health care reserve fund.

A long time ago I pointed out that the Dems would try to replace spending on the project of the Iraq War with spending on programs, programs that will never end and only grow larger.

It’s as if you had a problem with your car, spent $800 to get it fixed, and then decided to spend $800 a month on dining out thereafter.

The son of embattled Sen. Roland Burris is a federal tax deadbeat who landed a $75,000-a-year state job under former Gov. Rod Blagojevich five months ago, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

Blagojevich’s administration hired Roland W. Burris II as a senior counsel for the state’s housing authority Sept. 10 -- about six weeks after the Internal Revenue Service slapped a $34,163 tax lien on Burris II and three weeks after a mortgage company filed a foreclosure suit on his South Side house.

A spokeswoman for the Illinois Housing Development Authority indicated Wednesday there was nothing improper about Burris II’s employment by the agency, whose mission includes overseeing mortgage programs for low-income home buyers and anti-foreclosure initiatives.

The traditional "anti-foreclosure initiative" of paying one’s mortgage appears not to have crossed his mind. (Via NRO Corner.)

Statutes that curtail [a woman’s] abortion choice are disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, in that forced pregnancy requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest.

and now, in a Senate confirmation hearing:

I made no Thirteenth Amendment argument. I can state categorically I do not believe the Thirteenth Amendment is relevant at all.

"I did not have legal relations with that Amendment!"

Her point is to let the Senators know she is under no obligation to tell them or anyone else the truth, ever.